A Fraud Trial Centers on Not-So-Fine Wine and Sky-High Prices

Rudy Kurniawan participating in a wine-tasting event in Los Angeles in 2005. He displayed no emotion when the verdict was announced on Wednesday.

Ricardo DeArantanha / Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press

By MOSI SECRET

December 12, 2013

They were French winemakers of the highest caliber, from a narrow strip in Burgundy, France, from families who for generations have produced some of the world’s most sought-after wine.

They took the witness stand in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, holding aloft purportedly rare bottles, decades old, from their vineyards that fetched tens of thousands of dollars at auction and in private sales. And then they described how the wines were counterfeits.

Fake labels. The wrong corks. Mysterious wine.

This was the testimony in the fraud trial of Rudy Kurniawan, a mysterious man from Indonesia who prosecutors say worked his way into the most rarefied circles of the superrich and made millions selling them counterfeit wine. The trial, which opened this week, has been a crash course in fine wine, a display in how people assign value to things they do not even understand, and a how-to, as in how to make fake wines.

Mr. Kurniawan, described by his lawyers as the son of a wealthy Chinese family, burst onto the fine wine scene in the early 2000s. He quickly developed a reputation as a wealthy prodigy with an unmatched palate, able to blindly identify the vintage and provenance of some of the world’s finest wines. He showed up at auctions in Beverly Hills, Calif., and in New York and helped drive the prices of many wines skyward.

Then things began to unravel.

On Thursday, Laurent Ponsot testified that he had learned that wines supposedly from his village, Domaine Ponsot in Burgundy, were to be auctioned in New York. He said he knew them to be fake, so he flew to New York and stopped the auction. In court he held up some of the bottles and identified the flaws.

“It’s very close,” he said. “It’s a good copy. But it’s not authentic.”

More than a dozen bottles in question sat on a table in the middle of the courtroom. As the bottles were handed to the jury, at least one juror gasped audibly upon hearing the cost of some of them, and shook her head.

Mr. Kurniawan has seemed calm during the trial, appearing confident even as the evidence appears to stack up against him. He has politely nodded hello to his old friends from the wine world who are now testifying for the prosecution.

Lawyers for Mr. Kurniawan have argued that he was a victim of counterfeiting just like everyone else. “If you’re buying a lot of wine, you’re going to buy a lot of counterfeits,” one of the lawyers, Jerome H. Mooney, said.